Urban Combat: Pots And Pans Vs. Drug Dealers

September 13, 1990|By Deborah Kaplan, Special to the Tribune.

DETROIT — A few residents of the southwest section of the city still sit out on their stoops, as people did decades ago when it was a working-class neighborhood. As if observing a ritual the purpose of which has long been forgotten, they stare straight ahead and don`t say much.

The neighborhood is desolate now; even the weeds in vacant lots seem sapped. The only signs of life come from crack houses, and when trade is slow the dealers just ``hang.``

Suddenly there`s a racket of clanking pots and pans, boomeranging chants and bullhorns trumpeting the advance of what sounds like an incendiary force of cafeteria workers. A brigade of 20 to 30 mostly elderly people rounds a corner and marches down Magnolia Street. They are spirited if slightly out of step. Bringing up the rear is a senior citizen shuffling in bedroom slippers, defiantly clenching a cigar stub in his jaw.

Veteran civil rights workers are here, and a few Detroit Greens. But the group mostly is made up of what one marcher calls ``rank-and-filers,`` meaning ordinary folks from the neighborhood. They chant, ``Pack up the crack and don`t come back`` and ``Down with dope, up with hope.``

The incantations seem to work a sort of magic, infusing the ragtag group with a righteous will to drive drug dealers out of the neighborhood.

``Damn right! We`re going to give them hell,`` said Bill Lindell, 64, jabbing his cigar into the air. ``You can put the book on that.``

The activists see themselves as mere grunts in the trenches of the war against drugs, digging in to reclaim neighborhoods that have been taken over by crack. Their battlegrounds are obscure, their heroics unheralded. But since the community group called We the People Reclaiming Our Streets-WE-PROS for short-started organizing these anti-crack marches citywide, hundreds of recruits have signed on.

``We`re a long way from becoming a mass movement,`` said WE-PROS member Grace Boggs, 75, a veteran of the civil rights movement. ``But the feeling that the enemy is in our midst and that we must confront it, that feeling is taking hold in the city.

``Jesse Jackson, when he came to Detroit last summer, said that we must march on crack houses just as though they were the Ku Klux Klan. The war on drugs isn`t just a battle on the federal level. If anything is going to be done, it`ll be done by people in the neighborhoods.``

For the past two years, WE-PROS has gone into neighborhoods to organize local church groups or block clubs into marching battalions. Tactics vary;

some community groups confront dealers head on, circling suspected crack houses to sing, pray and bang on pots and pans as if to exorcise the evil.

WE-PROS claims to have closed down a few. Either the group harangued the dealers until they scattered, or police raided the houses that WE-PROS targeted.

The police department gets hundreds of complaints of drug trafficking every week. Whether WE-PROS has dented the drug trade is difficult to say. But police Commander Mack Douglas of the 12th precinct on the city`s northwest side believes the group definitely has had an impact.

``I went to a rally of theirs and you could just feel the excitement in the community. As long as you have that kind of community support and togetherness,`` Douglas said, ``you have a hope of survival.``

To WE-PROS founder Dorothy Garner, acting together is ``our only salvation. We`ve got to stop killing our brothers and sisters. We`ve got to get back to the values of `Thank you` and `I`m sorry ma`am` and `He is my brother.` ``

But drugs, guns and neglect are so powerful in some sections of Detroit that those areas seem beyond redemption. So many youths are shot and killed that both daily newspapers keep a running tab of casualties.

Detroit had the nation`s highest per capita murder rate until two years ago, when Washington, D.C. overtook ``Murder City.`` If automakers continue their rate of layoffs and factory shutdowns, crack threatens to become Motor City`s dominant industry.

Some people dismiss WE-PROS marches as so many quixotic tilts at the windmill of drugs, violence and despair. But Garner believes big social changes start with small, symbolic gestures. Like the freedom marches of 30 years ago, Garner said, ``There just comes a time in your life when you`ve got to make a stand.``

The time came for Garner when crack dealers threatened one of her northwest Detroit neighbors-a block club president who had the temerity to shout ``Thank You Jesus!`` as she stood on the porch of her home, watching police arrest some of the dealers operating a crack house across the street. Dealers still at large were quick to retaliate, first sending an ambulance, then a hearse to the elderly woman`s home.

Garner, a 60-year-old grandmother who works as a prison guard, decided to jump into the fray: ``I just got fed up. The only thing I knew to do was to organize, to get the good people together and talk and walk and let the dealers know we were not afraid.``

Each step the marchers take is a triumph over fear. Many residents are so afraid to venture out into their crime-ridden neighborhoods that they stay barricaded behind their doors even when WE-PROS comes marching down the street. Those residents out on the streets often shout encouragement-``All right! ``God bless you!``-but few ever join in.

Garner is not discouraged: ``Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, sit up in bed and have the thought: You can`t stop now; you must go on. `Cause I have an 8-year-old grandson who must survive this. So I will continue to do what I have to do.``